Let There Be Light

Yeah, but it ain’t exactly Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, you know?

“And what can life be worth if the first rehearsal for life is life itself?” – Milan Kundera, the Unbearable Lightness of Being

The true 21st century vagabond is feeling scared for the first time in his life. Scared, not because of the ridiculous lack of evidence in ITs wisdom, but of expectations.

IT, is Marriage.

Yep, yours truly is getting married, and there isn’t a book called The Oxford’s Guide to Husband’s Dos and Don’ts out there for one who subscribes to the hybrid of cheaply understood Old Testament and a prejudically scanned Koran(just in case there really is an entrance exam at heaven’s gate).

No amount of Khalil Gibran will prepare you for this kind of things, really. And certainly not that whining bitch called Paolo Coelho either.

So what’s one to do in this state of mind?

One prepares for the parties.

You heard me right: parties.

So I guess it’s about time I dust off this great book about throwing great parties, a book I love oh-so-dearly:

The Great Gatsby.

And we’ll need wine. Plenty of.

sticky shit

I love cooking, and I have a large AllClad pan. It looks pretty low tech, this pan, until you use it.

I can deal with almost all kind of cheapo pans, as long as they are not Teflon coated, I hate those non-stick shit, coz they take away that certain “seared” looks of the eggs I fry.

But funnily enough, I do like my shit non-stick.

See, sometimes you go to a friend’s place and you need to take a shit, and your shit turns out to be the sticky type and they can’t be flushed out no matter know many times you try.

So you’re kinda stuck in your friend’s toilet not knowing what to do, coz it’ll be damn embarrassing when the next guy (or worse, girl) walks in and there it is…your shit, sticking on the toilet bowl.

I dunno about those imported stuff coz I use only Goh Ban Huat toilets, I dunno why nobody ever thought of Teflon-coating the toilet bowl, really, I mean it’s such a simple idea, and I bet my yellow ass I’m not the only one who has to wrap my hand in toilet paper to clean up the stickies.

I truly admire those people who are born Teflon coated, people like Rosmah and Jib.

No shit ever stick to them, even when the shit hits the fan.

the bargain

Over dinner last night Midge said she has deleted my name from her list of potential boyfriends because I do not dance.

The truth is I actually do dance, but only in horizontal positions. Of course I didn’t tell Midge that, she is a very well brought-up girl, and doesn’t engage herself in risqué talks.

Of all the reasons I got deleted from the lists of the girls I like, Midge’s seems the most reasonable. It’s reasonable because dancing is part of her of joie de vivre. And unlike shopping for Pradas and Guccis, dancing is a very musical undertaking and that is something very profound.

Compare that to say, the girl who deleted me for my lack of intellect… I mean, truthfully, you tell me, with all puns intended, how on earth does constant nagging about Existentialism actually improve your daily existence?

I make good coffees, and I make great crepes (both the sweet AND the savoury type, for Christ’s sake). I’m a good handyman that gives better massage, often with plenty of extras thrown in too.

I secretly filter all them movies before watching them with you like I am watching them for the first time, because I know the pain of having to watch some imbecilic Tom Cruise shit.

I compile the iTune playlists to suit every possible mood you could be in (including our breakups).

I make sure your left shoe stays on the left and the right shoe right; and the damned yellow price stickers taken off the soles.

I make sure I wipe the Sensodine nozzle clean every morning, and I am always ahead of the blue indicator on your Oral Bs.

And you don’t remember when was the last time you need to charge the cellphone battery, do you?

You know why?

Because I always have 3 fully charged batteries for it.

That’s why.

So if Midge deleted me for being not much of a dancer, I can take it like a gentleman that I actually am.

I just have problems with others.

Plus, Midge is 84 this year and she doesn’t have time to waste on a guy like me.

But if you asked her, Midge would tell you that all things considered, I am actually not at all a lousy bargain.

sneakered

Basically you can’t access any WordPress blog in China, a country with 50 million bloggers, many of them pro(vincial) bloggers on Communist payroll to influence (or manage) netizens’ perception of the Chinese government.

I’m reading my own blog for the first time, so that can only means I am outside of China. All this while I relied on Dorothy, Joanne, and another Joanne to post stuff for me.

It’s good to be back.

First thing I did was stuffing my face with curry fish head in Brickfields with Rajendra.

It’s Coco and Mitch’s wedding day tomorrow.

There will be rowdy banquet with karaoke.

There will be plenty of concerned relatives who’d want to fix me up with some kampong chicken.

There will be plenty of alcohol for me to drown my sorrow in.

But tomorrow is Coco and Mitch’s wedding day and I will be the best man.

I have toast to make and I haven’t got time for a hair cut.

Damn, I don’t even have a pair of decent shoes.

Mitch said it’s okay, we’ll have a sneakered best man.

Mitch is always okay with stuff.

That’s why he needs Coco to scrutinize stuff before he can okay them.

I am confident that this pair will be a great new balance.

To Coco and Mitch:

Cheers!

killing time

Of the quartet at the table, 3 are left-handed if you include yours truly, the partly reformed lefty. The odd one out was Kenny, the Hong Kong born multi-discipline artist.

 

It reminded me of how I was the odd one out at our family dinner table when I was little. There were 10 of us sharing a square table back then, and a left-hander wasn’t exactly the best partner in synchronized eating with chopsticks.

 

We were having brunch with chopsticks at a restaurant next to my office in Shanghai when design guru Sean told us how his dad bought their first black-and-white television after noticing him and his brother watched a neighbor’s TV from a distance with a pair of binoculars and took pity on them.

 

Kenny recalls how his family filed a complain after failing to see any color on their family TV soon after HKTV started broadcasting in living colors, only to be told that it doesn’t work that way, that you first need to get a color….

 

The first TV in my family was a hand-me-down black-and-white given to us by a friend who had recently switched to a colored set. To make sure we’re up to date with the latest technology we soon affixed a tri-color filter to the screen, and lo and behold….

 

Teresse was sitting there stuffing her face with fried radish cake and listening to us talking old time; she is too young to have seen the world in black and white.

 

She was lucky we didn’t go into the radio days.

 

I was watching Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion the other day and I thought of my own radio days…unlike the gospel-compliant APHC, the ICI herbicide sponsored traveling radio shows of my pre-puberty days were saturated with dirty jokes that I now suspect were designed to spur the birth rate among the poor farmers who constituted a large majority of their listeners.

 

Unforgettable were the neighbors sitting around our Philip’s radio like cavemen would sit around a bonfire.

 

A lot of those people are gone already.

 

Including my grandpa, grandma, uncles, aunties, cousin…

 

They are long gone like the traveling radio shows.

 

 

Photograph by Ralph Gibson